Academic Rigor or Institutional Anxiety?

The “smoke-filled” rooms of Loeb House— home to the University’s governing bodies and their administrative offices—have more in common with the crowded newsroom of the New York Times than you might expect: both are filled with people talking about Harvard, though hardly any of them actually go here. The University and its students remain under constant attack from politicians, the press, and professional pearl-clutchers. Instead of using this moment to bring those in administrative power closer to the students, the latest update—the “Update on Grading”—that hit our inboxes last Monday, only serves to widen the chasm between the administration and the students it aims to serve. 

The report reads more like a perfectly crafted PR response rather than genuine educational reform, an attempt to appease critics rather than defend the excellent quality education that Harvard provides. When faced with intense external pressure from politicians and media outlets questioning the school’s every move, the administration chose to solve a public relations problem by creating an academic one. The world has shifted from the days when academics were the sole priority. Today, students are expected to balance their studies alongside extracurriculars, leadership roles and an active social life. This latest announcement is a potential attempt to drag us back in time, hold us to unrealistic standards, and has created a problem no student wanted in the first place. 

Forget the statistical analyses of rising GPAs or the dubious use of Q scores as a true measure of student effort; it was one particular criticism of the student body that caught my eye. According to the report, an overwhelming majority of faculty agree, to varying extents, that “Harvard students do not sufficiently prioritize their coursework.” Yet, later in the same report, the administration admits that their own data suggest “that students are working as hard as they ever have—if not more.” Students are spending nearly an hour more outside of the classroom on coursework compared to 2015, yet we are not, according to 69% of faculty, sufficiently prioritizing our coursework. So which is it? How can we be working harder than ever, yet somehow still not hard enough? 

The faculty’s complaint about student’s priorities might hold merit if we lived in a world where academic performance was the only measure of success, but that’s no longer the world we live in. Students are forced to balance academics and extracurriculars, not out of pure choice but because the world demands it. It’s an untenable argument to criticize students for doing what is required to excel professionally. 

We’re expected to succeed academically, which we do, and build competitive résumés for life after college. It says so, in the case of Harvard Law School, not in the fine print but in bold letters under the title Standards for Admissions: “As a general guideline, most admitted applicants demonstrate potential for success in law school through an exceptional undergraduate academic record, standardized test scores in the top percentiles, and substantial accomplishments in work or extracurricular activities.”

This phenomenon is not limited to law school; it is true for medical schools, business schools, and the job market more broadly. The University’s administration seems to be stuck in the past, while the student body has adapted to the realities of the modern professional world. Academics are no longer the be-all and end-all; they remain an essential foundation, but are just that, a base upon which everything else must be built.

This push toward grading reform isn’t about student effort or priorities. By the administration’s own admission, we already meet those expectations. This is about PR and damage control, about having a ready answer when the next volley of criticism comes from D.C. questioning Harvard’s high GPAs, or when the New York Times runs yet another piece accusing us of laziness. The student body is becoming collateral damage in a political battle over a narrative that has nothing to do with learning. We’re not being asked to work harder; we’re being asked to accept standards that have already failed elsewhere.

Princeton and Wellesley tried similar grading policies, only to reverse them amid student concerns that such policies “increased stress and discourage[d] collaboration.” Cornell and Dartmouth also attempted scaled-down versions of this approach, with little success. When this policy inevitably fails, what will remain is a betrayed student body and graduating classes whose transcripts bear the marks of a failed experiment.

When we applied to this university, we accepted the potential opportunity to learn, grow, and prepare ourselves for the challenges of an ever-evolving world. What we didn’t sign up for was to be pawns in a political PR game. The smoke in Loeb House may be thick, but it’s not thick enough to obscure the foundational principle upon which this University was founded: Veritas, truth. And the truth is that no amount of grade reform will ever satisfy Harvard’s critics, but it will certainly damage those it aims to serve. 

So what’s next? Expanding student participation in upper-level university decision-making beyond the Harvard Undergraduate Association is a complex problem with no clear solution. Even so, the idea of Mitbestimmung speaks to me as the most convincing of solutions to the issue. 

Mitbestimmung is a German concept that mandates that employee representatives are included on the supervisory boards of large companies. We have the HUA, but by including them on the University’s actual supervisory boards, it would ensure that our voices and grievances are actually listened to. We win when the University wins, and we, the students, lose when the University loses. Does that not make us, in effect, shareholders? 

The Concept acknowledges that those affected by an organization’s decisions deserve a voice in shaping them. In Germany, Mitbestimmung is not controversial; it is just good governance. We’re not asking to run the university; we’re asking to be formally consulted and taken seriously when it comes to our concerns about topics that will directly affect our education and futures. 

Take the issue of grade inflation, for example. If students had formal representation and were involved from the very beginning, maybe we would not be seeing the widespread backlash that has spread across campus. How we solve the issue of grade inflation, I do not know. Perhaps we abandon our current grading system and place more emphasis on “contract-based learning” or make participation a much more prominent feature of academic life to ensure people show up to class and are involved in discussions. An alternative to the issue of “disparities in grading between concentrations, between courses, and even between sections of the same course” is to go course by course and correct these issues to form more uniform standards instead of making broad sweeping reforms that do not address the root of the issue. 

The point is, as this op-ed makes clear, we do not have all the answers, but we deserve to be part of the discussions searching for them. Our opinions would not be perfect, but we would bring the unique perspective of those actually living through these potential policies. Mitbestimmung doesn’t give workers control of their companies; it just ensures that their voices are heard when it matters most. If the administration truly believes that it’s acting in its students’ best interest, what is there to lose by including us in their deliberations? Office hours are not going to cut it; we need a seat at the table. 

Noah Basden ’29 (nhbasden@college.harvard.edu) is wondering where this supposed grade inflation is and why it hasn’t blessed him yet.